On January 13, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova , the Ukrainian president's chief of staff, of falsifying history.
Her gripe? Yermak that the former Soviet rocket scientist and spacecraft designer Sergei Korolev was a Ukrainian.
Zakharova :
That is misleading.
In fact, Korolev's family traced its ancestry in Ukraine . Korolev considered himself a Ukrainian, spoke Ukrainian as his native language and loved Ukrainian songs. Until he was 19, Korolev lived, studied and designed aircraft in Ukraine.
Zakharova’s comment, however, fits squarely within Russian attempts to deny Ukrainian legitimacy as part of its ongoing war. It’s also reminiscent of efforts in Soviet-era Russia to different ethnic groups to fabricate a unified Soviet identity.
The ethnic backgrounds of famous Soviet scientists were not publicized during the Soviet period from 1932 to 1991, nor have they been in President Vladimir Putin's Russia.
We know a lot about Korolev thanks to a three-volume biography written by his daughter Natalia. Titled it was published in 2007 in Moscow. The books reveal many details of his life and include relevant documents.
Korolev was born in 1907 in the Russian Empire’s Zhytomyr region, which is now part of Ukraine. His father was of Russian and Belarusian origin. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy with Zaporizhian Cossack, Greek and Polish roots.
Three years after Sergei Korolev was born, his parents , and he never saw his father again. Korolev lived in the city of Nizhyn, Ukraine. According to , he was brought up in a Ukrainian cultural environment:
From 1917 to 1924, Korolev lived with his family in Odesa, Ukraine, where he graduated from secondary school and then received training as a carpenter. In 1923, he joined the Society of Aviation and Aerial Navigation of Ukraine and Crimea, where .
In 1924, he applied to the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI). On his application, Korolev indicated :
By the time he was 18, Korolev spoke several languages besides Ukrainian – Russian, German and English. But he considered :
Korolev lived in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic , when he left the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and moved to Moscow. In the Soviet capital he continued his education in aircraft mechanics at the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School.
Although he departed Ukraine, he did not stop using the Ukrainian language. In 1934, when he was 27, the Kharkiv, Ukraine, newspaper "Tekhnika" published an article by him titled, “Rocket planes will fly over the USSR." The article .
According to his daughter, he never lost his love for the :
Korolev lived mostly in Moscow until the end of his life.
In 1938, Korolev, then a member of the Reactive Research Institute, with trying to sabotage the Soviet rocket program. During his arrest, which came amid a series of political purges under Soviet leader Josef Stalin, his passport was confiscated; it lists .
Korolev was sent to a forced-labor camp in Siberia, where he was mistreated and lost his teeth due to scurvy, according to a 2021 retrospective in the magazine .
After the Second World War, however, Stalin made rocket science a national priority. Korolev appealed his case and was re-sentenced to a , a research laboratory operating within the Soviet forced-labor system. There, he designed rocket boosters under threat of execution.
Korolev grew to become in human space exploration, guiding the Soviet Union to an early advantage over the United States in missile and space programs.
Under Korolev’s , the Soviets in 1957 the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, Sputnik, and sent the , Yuri Gagarin, four years later. (They also sent the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into orbit in 1963.)
Gagarin’s name became known to almost everyone, but only a few with access to Soviet state secrets knew the identity of Korolev. In official Soviet documents, he was simply called " purportedly to protect him from U.S. assassination attempts.
Can Sergei Korolev be called a Soviet scientist? Yes, given that both Ukraine and Moscow were then part of the Soviet Union and he lived and worked in the Russian capital.
Can we also call him a ? Yes, since he was Ukrainian by place of birth, ethnic origin, native language, early education and – critically – self-identification.
Zakharova’s dismissive reference to his birthplace diminishes his Ukrainian identity.
A paragraph from of her father offers a direct rebuttal: